Month: January 2019

A good long read about why it’s so exhausting to participate in the art world. Especially if you are a woman.

“Being an artist now is…almost 50 percent celebrity-ness and charm, and in order to get past that, you have to have really strong work,” said Fox. “Men’s charm, aka sexiness, lasts up until they’re 55, whereas women aren’t sexy after 40, 45, and there’s a huge flirtation thing that goes on in the art world that has to do with charming curators.”

“They cannot scare me with their empty spacesBetween stars–on stars where no human race is.I have it in me so much nearer homeTo scare myself with my own desert places.”
-Robert Frost

Landscapes of the mind are these drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal in an exhibit called The Beautiful Brain, most recently exhibited at MIT.

A passage from the exhibition catalogue notes the poetic thoughts he had about the scientific discoveries he was making.

The hippocampus:
Cajal highlights the prominent role of pyramidal neurons in the hippocampus (in this drawing). The pyramidal neurons are the darkly colored cells (a and b) whose cell bodies lie near the outside of the hippocampus and whose dendrites extend toward the center. Cajal waxes poetic about hippocampal pyramidal neurons in his autobiography: “[The] pyramidal cells, like the plants in a garden – as it were, a series of hyacinths – are lined up in hedges which describe graceful curves.”